Table of Contents

Over the course of those last two years, I found a structure for having 1on1
meetings that helps me a lot to get the most of these meetings, and which also
helped to make 1on1s a deeply ingrained part of vaamo’s tech team culture.

Structure

All of the below elements, can be used on their own and you don’t necessarily
have to do all of them in every meeting. But of course to some extent, used
together they are stronger than each of them is on their own.

If you’re starting out doing 1on1s with your team, I suggest you start out with
one element only and over time add more elements.
They’re ordered in a way that each element builds upon the previous ones and
expands them in a sensible way.

Prepare - Choose a Theme

While some posit that 1on1s are the employee’s
meeting and I’d generally agree with that statement,
it’s your job as manager to have your team member’s back and make sure the
1on1 is useful in any case.

By that I mean, you should at every point in the 1on1 be able to take the lead
and steer the meeting into a direction that’s useful to you and your team
member. Proper preparation can enable you do to that.

What worked very well for me, is to set a theme beforehand. Think of a theme that
gives you both valuable insights.
Have you talked about how the team could improve lately? Do you know who your
team member thinks is doing a great job on the team? Why? Do you know what they
think of your management style? Do you know where they’d like to be supported
more? Do they have a grasp on where they’re going with their career?

Having a regular direct line to your team via 1on1s is a powerful tool to get an
intimate view into the opinions of your whole team. By setting a theme and
asking everyone the same or a similar set of questions in their 1on1s, you can
get a good picture of how your team feels about certain things.
In my recent experience, it was immensely helpful to know what made everyone on
the team feel productive, by asking everyone in their respective 1on1 the same
set of question, which was “Do you feel productive in your day to day work? What
makes you feel productive?”. The answers enabled profound changes and increased
happiness across the team, and event after quite some time now still prove very
helpful in designing processes.

Listen

You, as a manager, should spend most of the time listening to what your team
member has to say. And by listening I mean to really try to understand what the
other person is saying, by putting your own definitions and opinions into the
background.

Look out for moments where you’re waiting to release an already prepared answer
to whatever your counterpart is saying at the moment, while they’re still
speaking. In those moments you think you know what the other person is saying.
But really all you’re doing is reacting to your pre-defined notion you have
about the other person.

Status Update

An important purpose of 1on1s is to get to know your team members’ views and
feelings about various things. And among “those various things” are also, let’s
be honest, current projects and tasks.

Everybody says “don’t use 1on1s for status updates”. But sometimes that status
is the thing that’s on everyone’s mind. So it’s simply not practical to not
exchange that update.

The most sensible thing you can do, is to make that update useful. Which in my
experience is done by limiting the time you spent with this update and by
getting the unique perspective of your counterpart on the subject. Make sure you
don’t spend time on defining and discussing concrete actions about the current
work, that should be postponed to be done later, even if directly after the
1on1.

So, don’t be too dogmatic on your definition of 1on1s but rather make sure
it’s useful for everybody.

Conclude with Something Actionable

The temptation is high to end the meeting, when you both feel there’s nothing
left to say. You possibly exchanged your views, at least you listened and
deepened your understanding of some area. You’re feeling all fuzzy, because
everything’s great. You’re awesome, your team member is awesome. And that’s it.

Take those extra 5 minutes if you will and decide together what the next action
for each or both of you should be. How can each of you make the next minor step
to improve one of the possibly many topics that was touched upon in that
specific 1on1?

Ending the 1on1 with some concrete actions, something that you can both be held
accountable to, is super important. Because it will bring constant progress into
your relationship with your team member. It will be one of the most natural
things for both of you, that over time you keep on making things better for both
of you.

But the rhythm of constant smaller actions, is also a great tool for building
trust. By constantly “showing up”, delivering on the agreed actionables, trust
will become a natural part of your relationship with your team member.

Dream Big

Having 1on1s and with this a regular point of contact, you and your
team member have a venue for working towards a larger, possibly far away
personal and/or career goal.

In most circumstances the product and what the company wants to do and achieve
is more or less well taken care of and worked towards. But when a single team
members personal development and career goals (or at least a direction in which
someone wants to go), it’s hard to place it somewhere it receives continuous
progress. And the rhythm allows you to chip away at this far-away looming
mountain of work. One step at a time.

Hot Topic: How long is a 1on1?

One of the minor but constantly asked-first questions about 1on1s is about the
length of the meeting. “How much time should we spend on the 1on1?”

I’ve read a lot of articles over time, where people mention 30min per 1on1 with
a weekly or bi-weekly schedule.

Personally I prefer longer but slightly less-frequent 1on1s, and currently my
1on1s are 1h long and we do them bi-weekly. I prefer this schedule, as I feel
that some topics, especially the hard ones, need time. The really interesting
stuff always happens sometime into the meeting, when people become more relaxed.
But that may very well be related to my personality, as I’m more the kind of
person who likes to take it’s time with hard topics.

TL;DR

If you’re not doing 1on1s yet with your team, I strongly encourage you to start
doing so. And if you’re not sure yet, take a look at the why behind
1on1s.

When starting out, begin with only a few practices outlined above and extend
over time. Time is on your side when doing 1on1s. If you stick with them,
you’ll have lots of iterations soon and can expand and play with the format
sooner than you think.